The Innovation Turbo-Charge: How To Train The Brain To Be More Creative

The data is overwhelming: creativity is far and away the most important skill needed to “thrive” (and this word is being used in opposition to “survive” here) in today’s world.

IBM, for example, conducted a global survey of 1500 business leaders in 60 countries, asking them what quality is most important in a CEO. Creativity was their number one answer (Fast Company did a pretty interesting breakdown of this study, check it out here).

Similarly, on the education front, everyone from Sir Ken Robinson to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has identified creativity as one of the most critical or (in Robinson’s case) the most critical skill our children need to excel in this century.

Ken Robinson on creativity (Photo credit: ecastro)

Moreover, a global survey conducted by Adobe found that 80% of people feel that creativity is critical to economic growth. I would also argue that—especially in light of all the recent news about robots coming to take our jobs—the jobs that appear to be least vulnerable to automation are the ones that require serious creativity. Which is to say, while on a national level, creativity may be fundamental to long term economic growth, on an individual level, in the years to come, creativity is also going to become fundamental to long term economic survival.

Unfortunately, the data is also depressing. Since 1990, Torrance Scores—considered the gold standard of creativity measurement” have been in serious decline, especially among younger children (K-6th grade). Today, only one in four people believe their living up to their creative potential and 3 out of 4 people say that despite the incredible upside to outside the box thinking, they are pressured at work to be more productive not more creative.

Part of the problem here is ignorance. For a very long time, we haven’t had a good enough understanding of creativity and how it works in the brain to be able to solve that problem. This is beginning to change.

For starters, while we used to believe that creativity was the act of making something out of nothing—that is, creativity proceeded by inexplicable intuition—we now that creativity is almost always recombinatory. It is what happens when new information bumps into old thoughts to birth something radically new. Thus, if you want to increase creativity, you need to increase three critical components: access to new information, pattern recognition (so ideas can link together), and access to a large database of old information (so disparate ideas can link together in novel ways).

And this is where flow states come into the picture. Researchers have known for a very long time that flow has a direct and significant impact on creativity (which also explains why Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, godfather of modern flow research, wrote a book called Creativity). More recently, we've begun to quantify this phenomena. Take this recent study conducted in Australia, which gave 40 people a very difficult brain teaser to solve—the kind that requires significant creativity to arrive at the right answer. No one could solve it. Then they induced flow artificially (for those who are technically curious, they used transcranial stimulation to induce transient hypofrontality) and 23 people solved the problem in record time.

This gaudy result (over a 500% boost in creativity) also tracks with a very preliminary study run by my organization, the Flow Genome Project, where subjects reported a 500% to 700% increase in creativity while in flow.

What’s more, we are starting to understand how flow works this magic. The state of flow literally surrounds the problem of creativity, using neurochemistry (among other things) to boost every stage of the creative process.

First, in flow, the brain release a bevy of neurochemicals, including norepinephrine, dopamine and anandamide. While all of these chemicals are feel-good reward drugs, they are also significant performance enhancers—with creativity being a large swatch of the performance they enhance.

To unpack this, let’s return to the stages of the creative process. To increase creativity you first need greater access to novel information. Well, both norepinephrine and dopamine are chemicals that amp up focus (so we pay more attention to the present moment and thus notice more novelty). More importantly, there’s an increasing pile of evidence that shows that dopamine and norepinephrine also lower signal-to-noise ratios in the brain, which is a fancy way of saying they increase pattern recognition—that is, they increase our ability to link ideas together.

Moreover, anandamide, boosts lateral thinking—that is the brain’s ability to access far flung information and link it together). In other words, the neurochemicals responsible for flow literally surround and amplify every step in the creative process.

What all this suggests is that one of the major problems faced by society today—how to train people to be more creative—could actually be solved by training people up in flow.